1. Marriage fraud found to be common loophole
2. DHS nominee to lead ID program she opposed
3. Experts: Obama likely to curtail raids
4. NY co. activists call for probe of hate crimes
5. Some illegals lead transient life

1.
Marriage Fraud: Big Problem
By Bradley Vasoli
The Bulletin (Philadelphia), December 3, 2008
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=20212107&BRD=2737&PAG=46...

A report by former U.S. consular officer David Seminara indicates marriage fraud remains an unresolved facet of recent efforts to strengthen enforcement of immigration laws.

Foreigners who get legal residency by marrying American citizens increased in number by more than 100 percent since 1985, reaching 274,358 in 2007. More than 2.3 million have done so since 1998. In 2006 and 2007, almost twice as many foreigners became legal residents via marriage to U.S. citizens as had gained green cards for employment purposes.

Mr. Seminara said his professional experience indicates many of these new immigrants include mail-order brides, participants in arranged marriages, money-motivated "cash-for-vows" spouses and other fraudulent marriage partners. He said, however, he finds the issue a challenge to parse because the vast majority of immigrants' marriage partners are legitimate.

"My experience as a consular officer and the experience of other officers ... the numerous arrests of those involved in marriage fraud schemes; and the hundreds, if not thousands, of Web sites that exist solely for the purpose of arranging scam marriages all indicate that marriage fraud is a serious problem that needs to be addressed if we are to implement any kind of meaningful immigration reform in the United States," the former foreign-service official wrote in a backgrounder for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

He said the consular officers he interviewed for the report estimated that anywhere from 5 to 30 percent of those who get green cards based on their marriages to legal U.S. residents have sham relationships with their spouses. And the record indicates some of those so exposed have been terrorists. An earlier CIS report examining the activities of 94 terrorists who resided in the U.S. between the early 1990s and the mid 2000s stated at least nine of those participated in spurious marriages.

"The use of fraudulent marriage petitions is prevalent among international terrorists, including members of al-Qaida," Mr. Seminara wrote.

His report said foreign men, some of them radical Islamists, sometimes coerce American women into marrying them to gain a path to legal residency in America. He witnessed firsthand this kind of scheme working in Macedonia, where a Kosovar man intimidated an Albanian-American woman into marrying him so he could come to the U.S. When asked to process the husband's visa request, he ordered authorities to remove the man from the office and facilitated the wife's return home.

Mr. Seminara recommends a number of reforms to minimize the marriage-fraud problem, including ending fiancée visas, abolishing waivers for those seeking admission on the basis of marriage if they have committed crimes and creating a national marriage-registration database. He said these reforms are long shots for enactment given that restrictionists currently have scant power in the federal government.

"Unfortunately, I'm not very optimistic about the prospects for the kind of immigration reform that I'm hoping for here," he said. "I think that politicians make the calculation that the vast majority of American voters aren't going to vote on the immigration issue."

He said his favored policy will only come to fruition if low-immigration advocates successfully articulate their position as at once pro-enforcement and pro-immigrant.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The CIS backgrounder, "Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name: Inside the Green Card Marriage Phenomenon" is available online at: http://www.cis.org/marriagefraud/pressrelease

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Terrorists, criminal aliens exchange vows with Americans
Marriage most common path to U.S. citizenship, residency for foreign nationals
By Chelsea Schilling
The World Net Daily News, December 2, 2008
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=82584

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2.
Nominee Would Lead ID Program She Opposed
By Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times, December 2, 2008

Washington, DC -- As governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for homeland security secretary, pledged that her state would not cooperate with a major domestic security initiative, the Real ID drivers’ license program.

The program, which she would direct if confirmed as secretary, imposes stringent requirements on states for confirming the identity and legal residency of people who want drivers’ licenses. Ms. Napolitano said the law would impose huge costs on the states without reimbursement from Washington.

In June, she signed into law a bill that forbids Arizona from cooperating with the federal requirements. The state law had no immediate effect, because Arizona already had a federal waiver allowing it to delay enactment until 2009.

Last year, as the chairwoman of the National Governors Association, Ms. Napolitano testified before a Senate committee that the program would cost the states $11 billion. Since then, Congress has appropriated $100 million to meet some of the costs.

Real ID follows the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission; it was passed without hearings or debate, attached to a mostly unrelated bill.

Janice L. Kephart, a staff member for the 9/11 Commission, said, “I’m hoping she will see this program from the federal government side and see it with new eyes.”

A stronger national driver’s license system would help the states improve highway safety by assuring that drivers do not obtain more than one license, Ms. Kephart said, and it could cut Medicare and Medicaid fraud.

Hani Hanjour, the hijacker flew the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, had an Arizona license, she said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/us/politics/02license.html?_r=1&adxnnl...

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3.
Immigration Experts Predict Fewer Workplace Raids
By Jennifer Ludden
The National Public Radio News, December 2, 2008

As the Obama administration takes shape, many experts are betting it will significantly curtail one of the most visible and controversial facets of the Bush administration's immigration crackdown: the high-profile workplace raids in which federal agents arrest dozens, even hundreds, of undocumented workers.

The number of people arrested in such raids has risen tenfold in the past five years, to 6,287 in 2008. Most have been administrative arrests. The biggest raids have made national news, but on any given week, there have been smaller ones across the country. They've targeted a San Francisco Bay Area chain of taquerias, Rhode Island courthouses and a Virginia painting company, to name a few.

As a candidate, Sen. Barack Obama questioned the effectiveness of such tactics in a 2007 interview with The Des Moines Register.

"I'm not particularly impressed with raids on plants that grab a handful of undocumented workers and send them home, leaving the company in a position where it can just hire the next batch," Obama said.

Calls For A Halt On Raids

Since the election, immigrant advocacy groups and Democratic members of Congress have intensified their calls for a moratorium on immigration raids, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has talked of finding a way to end them. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) says the undocumented workers being arrested and deported have millions of family members who are legal residents or U.S. citizens, and he says the effect has been devastating.

"You have single mothers now," Gutierrez says. "You have young, 15-year-old kids with no father. Think about that a moment. And the government took your dad away."

The Bush administration actually spent years pushing to legalize undocumented workers. But when a broad immigration overhaul failed in Congress two years in a row, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff dramatically ramped up worksite raids, along with other get-tough measures. In recent months, a number of studies have shown a big drop in illegal migration, and while Chertoff admits the tanking economy played a big role, he credits his agency's crackdown as well.

"This is a direct result of strong, positive enforcement, which is yielding measurable results," he says.

Doris Meissner, a former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and now a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute, is not convinced.

"I think a lot of what's been going on has been high-visibility disruption for its own sake," she says. "I'm not sure there's a real strategy that's guiding it."

Shifting Focus To Employers?

Meissner does not believe President-elect Obama will end worksite raids altogether, but she does foresee a shift in focus to employers, and a far broader approach to holding them accountable. Meissner says basic labor law enforcement has languished for years. She expects an Obama administration to devote more resources to protecting wage and safety standards. She also says leveling the playing field in that manner would go a long way toward weeding out undocumented workers.

Obama also has spoken of the need for a reliable way to check workers' legal status. That has cheered even the staunchest supporters of the current government crackdown, such as Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

"Even though I expect the Obama administration is going to dial back on worksite raids," Krikorian says, "I don't think it's a complete disaster, because you're going to see employer-oriented enforcement continuing."
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97700373

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4.
Activists call for investigation of Suffolk hate-crime statistics
By Reid J. Epstein
Newsday (NY), December 2, 2008

The Suffolk Legislature should create a task force to investigate the county's official hate crime statistics, Legis. DuWayne Gregory said Tuesday.

Gregory (D-Amityville) said he will introduce legislation later this month to create a 12-member panel to study the Suffolk Police statistics that show anti-Hispanic hate crimes fell from 15 in 2004 to one in 2007.

Marcelo Lucero, an immigrant from Ecuador, was stabbed to death Nov. 8 in Patchogue after a group of seven teenagers in search of a Hispanic man to harass surrounded him.

Gregory, who called the county figures "suspect," said he wants to launch "an open discussion about hate crimes in Suffolk County." The task force, he proposed, would include members appointed by the Legislature, the police department, the county executive, the district attorney, local clergy and school districts. His proposal would include a $5,000 budget and give the task force a year to issue a written report.

Legis. Jack Eddington (I-Medford), the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, said he would work with Gregory to create the task force. Eddington said he was unaware that teenagers in his district regularly targeted Hispanic men to beat up, as police have reported since Lucero's death.
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http://www.newsday.com/news/local/suffolk/ny-poimmi1203,0,208183.story

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5.
Today's migrant worker: life in shadows of opulence
By Megan Woolhouse
The Boston Globe, December 3, 2008

Julian Aleman spends winters in Myrtle Beach or Boca Grande. He summers in Nantucket and Kennebunkport. And while his journeys might sound like a glitzy advertisement off the pages of a travel magazine, his lifestyle is not in the least about leisure.

While he follows the sun and the money, he's not the tanned tennis pro who travels from resort to resort or the beach bum who follows his whims. Aleman is a modern migrant worker, but rather than toiling in the fields of yore, this summer he worked at Nantucket Yacht Club as a dishwasher, cleaning the silver and stemware of the high-society set.

Resorts, hotels, and restaurants far and wide have hired him - and many others - to work on their lawns or in their kitchens.

Part of an emerging underground network that functions largely by word of mouth, Aleman is a simple worker who represents a complex problem: While he seems to have it great, his labor is often difficult and his life rootless. And while he uses his pay to support a family in the United States and Honduras, he is often accused of taking jobs from locals.

"Everybody's always confused about how I got here," the 41-year-old Honduran native said as he leaned back in his chair recently at a Nantucket restaurant. "They say, 'Julian has no car, no money.' I have only connections. I got a lot of friends everywhere, a lot of connections."

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that about 500,000 service workers - dishwashers, barbers, and others - were in Massachusetts in March. It does not track how many are here seasonally.

For Aleman, it's a life lived on the fringes of opulence. He often works 12-hour days near the ski slopes of Tahoe or the white beaches of Jupiter Island. His bedroom may have a panoramic view of Nantucket Harbor, but he shares the tiny space with two other immigrant workers.

"The area, the geography might sound attractive, but it's no vacation for them," said William Rodriguez, a Boston immigration lawyer. "It's long hours and dirty work and somebody's got to do it. Unfortunately, the people that usually end up doing it are people of color."

To Aleman, 41, the Nantucket dishwashing gig is not only the best job he has ever held, it is the culmination of years of hard work and some luck. He came to the United States illegally, at age 27, hopping a bus from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, into Mexico, hundreds of miles north. Then, he and a friend spent days traveling by foot through the Sonoran Desert into Arizona, he said.

That was 14 years ago.

This summer, Aleman earned $16 an hour as a dishwasher. He lived in a tiny, third-floor room on the yacht club grounds for free. The space was cramped, despite Aleman's few possessions, such as a bottle of fish oil tablets - his health insurance - and a few bright-colored polo shirts.

To get to this point of relative comfort has been a strange adventure, he said. A woman once charged him $300 to place him in a job at a restaurant in Knoxville, Tenn. He earned $250 a week but quit after working more than 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, only earning enough to break even. Quitting left him homeless, on the streets, and in tears, he said.

He has worked in restaurants from Los Angeles to Atlanta as a dishwasher. There was a stint in a soy bean processing plant in Georgia ($5.50 an hour) and at an International House of Pancakes in Tennessee ($7 an hour).

His big break came in 1997 when he got two jobs. One was a day job busing tables at the Park Vista Hotel and Convention Center in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and night-time work washing dishes at the Park Grill Steakhouse. He earned about $600 a week and beefed up his references.

He got a job at Jonathan's Landing Golf Club in Jupiter Beach and won $10,000 at a casino in Florida. He bought a cellphone (he had been using pay phones) and got jobs at the exclusive Gaspar Island Hotel and the private Boca Grande Club (where members "find life as you imagine it should be lived.")

When the Globe attempted to confirm his employment at various locations, only the Park Vista Hotel responded, saying in an e-mail that Aleman had worked there for a year. That might be because some immigrants work under the table. And some businesses do not want to acknowledge hiring immigrants at all because of political controversy over illegal immigration.

Some researchers and politicians say immigrants have taken jobs from American workers, and in particular, teenagers and college students.

"The question is why are we bringing a guy in from Honduras, paying him $17 an hour, and not giving that job to a kid from New Bedford or Fall River?" said Paul Harrington, an economist at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "It's a failure of the system, plain and simple."

Steven Camarata, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., said many argue that such workers as Aleman take jobs Americans won't. He said it's more important to note that such networks are increasingly playing "a very significant role" in the national economy.

"You would think it wouldn't be that efficient. I mean what does he make when he goes to Boca and how far is it?" Camarata said. "But one of the benefits for our society is we get a guy who's willing to do this work. And the downside is that it creates job competition for the poorest of Americans."
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/12/03/today...